A review by andipants
Old Town in the Green Groves: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Lost Little House Years by Cynthia Rylant
3.0
I've read this before - just once, not the countless times I've read the original series - but our camping trip is in the process of getting rained out, so when I realized our campground was only about 8 miles from Burr Oak, you know I was going to stop by the LIW museum there, and of course I had to pick up a copy of the book and re-read.
The story follows the facts of the Ingalls family as far as they are known during the gap between the events of On The Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It was a difficult and often unhappy time for the family, including more lost crops, illness, and, (likely part of the reason Laura skipped those years in the first place). The book does a good job of not shying away from difficult subjects, although at times it did seem almost emotionless - surely they would have been a little more affected by some of these events? But then again, in The Long Winter, they spend all of one page actually upset about near-starvation, so maybe that's in keeping with the original books.
The writing was not bad, by any means, but it was noticeably different than the original series. Some of this is surely due to the fact that it was written by two very different people some 70 years apart, but there were also some significant stylistic differences that felt jarring to me. For example, a lot of Pa's dialogue felt wrong - the way he regularly called each girl by pet names (in the original series, only Laura ever had pet names, which helped to emphasize that she was Pa's special helper), or when he multiple times described things as "blasted" (and Ma didn't step in to say "Language, Charles," as she aways did in the original series.
Judging the book solely on its own merits, I'd give it four stars - it's a solid piece of MG historical fiction. But it was explicitly written and marketed as a new addition to the Little House series, and on that basis, I have to bump it down to three. It just doesn't fit terribly well, writing-wise, with the original series. Cynthia Rylant is a very good author, no question, but she admits herself in the afterword that she didn't read the books until she was an adult - it seems a lifetime fan with a thorough knowledge of the books and an intuitive feel for Laura's prose style might have been a better choice for this project.
The story follows the facts of the Ingalls family as far as they are known during the gap between the events of On The Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. It was a difficult and often unhappy time for the family, including more lost crops, illness, and
Spoiler
the death of Laura's baby brother, FreddieThe writing was not bad, by any means, but it was noticeably different than the original series. Some of this is surely due to the fact that it was written by two very different people some 70 years apart, but there were also some significant stylistic differences that felt jarring to me. For example, a lot of Pa's dialogue felt wrong - the way he regularly called each girl by pet names (in the original series, only Laura ever had pet names, which helped to emphasize that she was Pa's special helper), or when he multiple times described things as "blasted" (and Ma didn't step in to say "Language, Charles," as she aways did in the original series.
Judging the book solely on its own merits, I'd give it four stars - it's a solid piece of MG historical fiction. But it was explicitly written and marketed as a new addition to the Little House series, and on that basis, I have to bump it down to three. It just doesn't fit terribly well, writing-wise, with the original series. Cynthia Rylant is a very good author, no question, but she admits herself in the afterword that she didn't read the books until she was an adult - it seems a lifetime fan with a thorough knowledge of the books and an intuitive feel for Laura's prose style might have been a better choice for this project.